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Bulgarian Green

I have been lucky enough to acquire a group of Bulgarian Green angels from the shipments received from Raiko last fall. I have a group of 4 Manacupuru crosses (D/+ bg/bg) and 4 Blue crosses (D/+ pb/pb bg/bg).

When these guys were small their fins were dark and they appeared to be what has become known as Bulgarian Seal Points. However, with the passing of time we have learned this was not the case. Currently in the USA we only have access to these crosses. This is evidenced by the loss of dark pigmentation overall as the fish grew and aged.

Those that Raiko shipped over are now pre-breeder size and close to maturing. While some have reported spawns with these fish I am not aware of anyone who is actually raising spawns at this point in time. The group I have has been dropping their tubes for at least a week, but no sparring or pairing action is occurring. But, I suspect that will change soon enough.

Here are a few photos of what I have to work with. Quality is not the greatest, but will keep trying to get better photos to share.

When they first arrived it was quite obvious they didn't have much in the way of dark pigmentation. In fact, only the Manacupuru crosses showed a hint of gray in their fins. While the fish were stressed from shipment none of the body stripes were apparent on the Blue crosses and a slight hint on the Manacupuru crosses.

A couple of the Blue Crosses are developing glitter as well (can also see that the stripes appear without black pigment same as would occur in an albino)

And a few more recent photos where there are visible signs of the stripes

Here's a video I took of the Bulgarian Green tank last night. There is also a pair of unmated DD Blacks in this tank as I had to get creative to house all my new arrivals. Please ignore my mumblings. My rescue dog is still a bit rattled after all the noises from fireworks and lightening storms.

Looks like things are going well with your BG stock....and sorry for the loses recently. It's a shame that we don't have any pure bg/bg stock to work with.......if so, test crossings could be done for possible verification and adding a new? gene....

keep up the good work.....are you by chance taking any counts of fry variants??

While what was shipped to the USA were either Blue or Manacupuru crosses couldn't we consider the Manacupuru a Silver genetically? Yes I agree it would have been great to have just bg/bg fish to begin working with. But we can pull it out of our existing stock to work backwards before we can move forward. Not thrilled to have a mixed pair (Blue male, Mana female), but at these early stages I will take what I can get!

Yes, I fully intend to keep track of the fry counts, documenting the parents, taking photos, etc. I am hopeful that my records will help with the TAS efforts to accept this new gene. If there is a preferred format the Standards Committee would like please let me know.

I believe there are other members who are working with this gene as well; however, I have not heard if they have had any breeding success or if they intend to document their breeding efforts and/or share it with TAS for acceptance.

The fish shipped to the UK were, I believe, from the same parents as those sent to the states.
so far I've paired just one fish, and disappointingly only have 7 fry from that pairing :-

the male was this fish :-

I paired him to a blue clown veil, as I wanted to see if he is one of the pb/pb fish, and to get stripeless & veiltail into my bg gene pool. My suspicion is that these darker bg's with obvious body bands are D/D rather than D/+ and this seems to be borne out, in that the 7 surviving youngsters appear to all be black lace. But with only 7 survivors, and those only a few weeks old, it's obviously too early to draw any firm conclusions.

I agree. The Manacupurus represent the pure form Bulgarian Green. +/+ - bg/bg. Unless Raiko specifically stated that there are other genes at work, the fish would be considered genetically pure as the Manacupurus have no domestic mutations in their lineage. This is assuming that even though bg/bg came from domestics with other mutations, Raiko performed crosses to wild angels to isolate the Bulgarian Green gene.